It’s About Time

Gathering at the hearth predates the Internet by 800,000 years. Gathering at the hearth predates communicating with symbols by 550,000 years. Gathering at the hearth predates an evolutionary adaptive increase in brain size by 300,000 years.

Before you were you, before your ancestors had evolved into a species that could charitably be mistaken for human, even before you first listened to James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” you were gathering at the hearth and sharing a meal. You think finding all those receipts and getting your taxes done takes forever? Please. You have no idea. Evolving from Homo ergaster to Homo sapiens, now THAT takes some time.

Not that there was much else to do, mind you, what with both discotheques and the Kardashians 4/5 of a million years down the road. What were you and your kith and kin doing gathering around the hearth? Were you waiting for the 787 Dreamliner to be invented so you could split from sub-Sahara Africa and check out who was playing at Madison Square Garden? No. What you were doing was you were sharing food.

That’s it. There wasn’t much else to do. Stone tools were several hundred generations down the evolutionary trail. There was no point in calling your Realtor to see if your condo had sold because, let’s face it, nobody was going to buy your condo.

Gathering at the hearth is what you did not only because there was nothing else to do (You think your kids are bored on a rainy Saturday morning now?) but also because it was the right call. In what is sometimes referred to as the anthropomorphic principle, those other guys, the ones who didn’t gather at the hearth and share food hoping that someone would hurry up and invent language so that they could tell the story of the talking dog? Those guys didn’t make it. They didn’t gather at the hearth and share food with anybody else so, when they had a bad day at the office and didn’t have any food themselves, nobody invited them round to have a bite. No sharing equaled no food equaled no kids. History may be written by the winners, but we’re talking pre-pre-history here. If you’re reading this blog post, it’s because not all of your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents got chomped or starved or hit by a bus. The best predictor of who will not have children is those who don’t have parents. Simply stated, those guys who didn’t gather at the hearth and share food went the way of the Beta Max machine although, as I hope the preceding paragraphs have made clear, for entirely different reasons.

The take away for loving parents trying to bring up healthy kids in this toxic world where the dangers of large predators have been replaced with the treats of handheld devices is transparent: eat dinner with your kids.

Share you values with your children over veggie burgers if you like; model appropriate behaviors–not eating soup with your hands, for example–if you must, but whatever you do, gather round the hearth and have dinner with your kids.

Bonus points if the kids help shop for, prepare, and clean up after the meal. Extra credit if you have “sobre mesa”, a leisurely conversation after eating. (No mention of homework, academic responsibilities, college applications, chores, or thank you notes allowed.)

Gathering at the hearth and sharing food is what made you into you. Gathering at the hearth and sharing food is what makes families into families.